Dave's thoughts on whatever happens to be passing through the transom of his mind.

20110823

Sometimes you need to step back

I just got For Your Eyes Only, and watched a few minutes out of a 'Making Of' documentary included on the disk. They mentioned that it was following up on Moonraker, and how successful Moonraker was (news to me; I thought it was supposed to be one of the worst Bond films). Anyway, the key point is that Moonraker was pretty far out there (in many different ways), and they realized that they needed to take a step back; if they tried to out-do it, they were going to lose all believability.

What I found hilarious about that is that, with the exception of Casino Royale, the last five to ten Bond films have just been completely detached from reality. Really, I was excited when Pierce Brosnan was named as the new Bond way back when; I'd been hoping for that since the idea of him doing that was first mooted in the late 80s (damn you, NBC!). But only one of his was even decent; they pretty much all failed on the believability scale.

So United Artists needs to go back and re-learn a lesson they first learned thirty years ago. Really, they should have retired the franchise a decade ago (we would have missed out on the excellent, if out of character, Casino Royale, but that's life). I hope they'll either re-learn that lesson, or retire the series.